As the Scarlett Johansson-stoked controversy rages over SodaStream’s West Bank operation, Israel’s centrist Minister of Finance has been considering what effect international opposition to settlement production will have if peace talks fail. And his verdict is pessimistic. In a speech at the Institute for National Security Studies, Minister Yair Lapid said that if Israeli or…
A bill introduced in the New York State Assembly would suspend funding to educational institutions which fund groups that boycott Israel. The legislation, introduced earlier this month by Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver and first reported by Mondoweiss, an anti-Zionist news site, would ban state funding to colleges which fund groups that boycott “in countries that…
Eleven students at a South Africa university charged with disrupting a concert by an Israeli musician were sentenced to community service. The students at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg forced the cancellation of a recital last March by pianist Yossi Reshef with their attempt to enforce a student-initiated cultural boycott of Israel on campus….
A bipartisan slate of 134 U.S. Congress members wrote a letter to the American Studies Association protesting its decision last month to boycott Israeli universities. “Academic cooperation can be an important tool to help foster peace between Israelis and Palestinians, but you have chosen the unproductive path of isolation,” said the letter dated Friday, initiated…
The literature on Jewish self-hate is vast; not so the literature on Jewish self-love. Max Weber once proposed that oppressed peoples develop a “theodicy of disprivilege,” a way of explaining to themselves (and compensating for) their persecution, and that the most common such theodicies rely on the assertion by the oppressed of their superior moral…
The Modern Language Association’s annual conference here this past weekend was chock full with panels of Jewish interest, including discussions of Philip Roth, Yiddish, Sholem Aleichem, Jonathan Safran Foer, Sephardic film, Jewish monsters, Zionism and Holocaust literature. But the only events of Jewish interest that most people seemed to care about were four sessions that…
Thinkstock I would love to say that powerful argument won the day. I’d like to claim that intellect and facts persuaded the members, and whether the resolution was won or lost, its decisive outcome was a result of profound and significant reflection. The first resolution before the Modern Language Association’s Delegate Assembly served to censure…
Thinkstock This year’s MLA was supposed to be discussing the crisis of affairs in the Humanities. Only a lucky few of the graduate students on the market with their freshly minted PhDs will find jobs in academia — ever. The increasing corporatization of higher education is driving the scholarly agenda, as funders begin to dictate…
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